Panoramas of Lost London

Over 300 spectacular photographs of London's lost buildings from English Heritage's archive.

Tudor, Georgian and Victorian buildings, some of them historic masterpieces, captured in location just before their destruction between 1870-1945 Sequel to the bestselling Lost London - takes a closer and more detailed view of the city's lost heritage and its social and economic history.

Philip Davies's best-selling Lost London 1870-1945 has been described as a publishing phenomenon. Opening windows on a vanished past it captivated modern audiences and was described by John Carey in The Sunday Times as a 'haunting portal into the bygone life of the capital'. Like its predecessor, Panoramas of Lost London reproduces historic photographs commissioned by London County Council - many of them in the early days of photography - to capture individual buildings and streets that, along with their entire neighbourhood, were on the threshold of redevelopment. Lost London's portrayal of whole buildings, entire streets and skylines was achieved by scaling the images which often made invisible the wealth of pin-sharp detail contained within the historic photographs. In the spring of 2010 English Heritage mounted an exhibition of highlights from Lost London at Kenwood House. Enlarged to poster size, the true quality of the 'lost' detail was revealed to astonished visitors that attended in record numbers. Overwhelming interest from the media and the public, has encouraged the author to return to this theme in close focus, enlarging over 180 of the photographs found in Lost London and adding over 1o0 new images to create the new, larger, landscape-format book, so readers can now enjoy the previously unseen gems of detail hidden in these historic pictures. The resulting changes in scale and cropping have have brought to light an astonishing depth of detail: haunting faces from the forgotten past live again, hoardings and shopfronts reveal their wares while architectural details and textures leap into focus reinforcing the sense of 'shock and awe' that Marcus Binney identified when reviewing Lost London in The Times. The result is a series of breathtaking visual revelations. Philip Davies' new text provides an informative essay, based on the structure he created for the Lost London Exhibition. The text is also the substance of Philip's increasingly popular illustrated lectures. Panoramas of Lost London's astonishing selection of pictures invites the reader to a close-up and vivid experience of a forgotten world at the time when London first became the ceaselessly-transforming greatest city in the world. This book, like its predecessor will redefine the reader's perception and experience of historic London.

Size: 290mm x 370mm

Extent: 320pp

Illustration: 300 spectacular photographs

Extras: French folds jacket, shrinkwrapped